It's always summer there and nothing changes

Dorota Stolarska

2018 - 2020

Warsaw, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland

It is impossible to go back in time, to recreate the situations from the past. The past is always viewed in the light of the present. Referring to my childhood plays, using the furniture and objects that I kept after my grandparents, in their empty apartment I create a contemporary projection of the image of the past.

As a child, I was unaware of the fact that a lot of the ordinary things that were in my grandparents' flat (souvenirs brought from exotic countries, letters sent from the furthest corners of the world, modern furniture) were not typical for most of the polish houses during that time but were related to my grandfather‘s position in the communist system. All three generations of women - my grandma (his wife), my mother, her sisters, and I did not know what exactly he was doing but in a way, it had an impact on us.

With my present knowledge, those things arouse different emotions and raise new questions. In my work, I use those things to create surreal situations and compositions as mismatched and unstable as scraps of information I have about my grandfather's life and his role in the communist system.

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